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When she joined Donald Trump’s relentlessly bumbling “elite strike force,” lawyer Sidney Powell was held up as a legal legend who would lend credibility to a campaign that desperately needed it. That image didn’t last long. After promising to “unleash the Kraken” upon incoming president Joe Biden, she…didn’t. Instead she proved kookier than even Rudy Giuliani, to the point that she was kicked off the team entirely, leaving her to pursue her own baseless claims of voter fraud independently. That’s not going well either, as witness a new lawsuit alleging malfeasance in a county that, well, doesn’t exist.

Powell has filed a number of lawsuits in states that were targeted by the Trump team, in the hopes of overturning their final results, even after they’d been certified. They’ve been disasters, riddled with errors, typos, and bizarre formatting hiccups that render them unreadable, on top of ridiculous. But one bit in the lawsuit she filed in Michigan caught the eye of Bridge Michigan journalist Jonathan Oosting.

“One of the witnesses in Sidney Powell’s new Michigan lawsuit says in a declaration he thinks there’s something fishy about election returns in Edison County, MI,” Oosting wrote on Twitter. “Thing is, there is no Edison County in Michigan.”

Hey, at least in this one she didn’t spell “district” four different ways! That’s what she did in her widely-belittled lawsuit in Pennsylvania, which certified its election for Biden before Thanksgiving.

But wait, it gets worse. There is no Edison County anywhere in the United States of America.

This lead to much mockery over social media.

Some wondered if the non-existent county played a role in Powell’s QAnon-level conspiracy theory about the late Hugo Chavez helping to steal the 2020 election.

Others roped in another popular Twitter subject.

The Trump team — which, again, ousted Powell from their ranks for making them look bad — has had a helluva time getting basic details about the state correct. One filed by attorney Lin Wood claimed fraud in Michigan, but used data from Minnesota instead. Wood gained notoriety for defending Richard Jewell, a rent-a-cop wrongfully accused of terrorism, in the mid-’90s, and was later played onscreen by no less than Sam Rockwell in last year’s Clint Eastwood movie. But judging how this case is going, it seems the next thespian to play Wood will be Rob Schneider in one of Adam Sandler’s Netflix comedies.

(Via The Inquisitr)

For most of us, politics have been an inescapable fact of life this year. Between pandemics, elections, impeachments, and Rudy Giuliani publicly melting like a QAnon-spouting Wicked Witch of the West, fissures became canyons and once-avoidable conversations became the only thing our conservative grandparents wanted to Zoom about.

So it’s understandable really that Jordan Klepper, comedian and Daily Show correspondent who regularly ventures out into the wilderness of Middle America to quiz fascist cosplayers on their devotion to a fast food-gobbling megalomaniac, would finally land on your radar. Klepper, who we chatted with about his own show The Opposition earlier this year, has been doing these “on-the-street” bits for a while now but something odd happened in 2020 … he defied the odds to become the politically competent thirst trap we didn’t know we needed.

I first noticed this undeniable transformation when Klepper returned to The Daily Show to cover Donald Trump’s impeachment scandal late last year. Klepper was on his usual schtick – teaching basic math to Trump supporters and hunting for the ever-elusive “Trump That B*tch” graphic tee – when suddenly, it hit me. I wanted Klepper to quit interrogating these homophobic groupies and start interrogating me (i.e. my body). It was a life-changing epiphany, a Moses-coming-down-from-the-mountain-type moment. But once the acknowledgment nestled itself in my brain, there was no extracting it. Klepper was, in fact, hot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-ZFoco_1gQ

That bell would toll plenty more throughout 2020. When Klepper attended the Iowa Caucus earlier this year, sporting a thick beard and disheveled hair, I was yet again confronted – as I’m sure we all were – with this surprising development. He walked confidently into a hostile space filled with uninformed, overconfident voters, openly mocking them to their faces, Trojan-horsing them with a friendly demeanor before humiliating them on national TV.

There’s a kind of danger in what Klepper does, an adrenaline rush that comes with the expectation he might be found out. Surely one of these Trump cronies will wise up to his gimmick and mark him as a threat to their hazardly-crafted ideologies? And yet, he forges on in the name of patriotism and rationality, doing the work behind enemy lines so that we, the people, can find some escapist humor in watching prejudice and racism beaten down with deadpan humor and sharp wit. Does something about Klepper shouting “It’s f*cking Caucaus time” get me excited? Yes, but once the thirst was recognized, the harder work of understanding why I was suddenly employing violently thirsty hyperbole to characterize a mostly average-looking white man began.

The investigation took me to New Jersey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6K–CokXUQ&t=222s

In the summer of 2020, Klepper stuffed his pasty, Gumby-like limbs into a pair of patriotic swim trunks to joke about man’s fixation concerning the size of their genitals with right-wing sea captains. I quizzed group chats on this new development during, what would’ve been, the peak of our collective quarantine. Perhaps, I thought, social isolation had warped my libido. I sent videos of Klepper facing off against Trump supporters on open water. “What do you think of this guy?” I’d ask.

“Why, does he want to date you?”

Clearly, none knew who Klepper was or where this fixation came from. But once they watched the man draw correlations between the number of Trump flags on certain vessels and the probability of mid-life sexual insecurities, it began to click. “He’s funny, but he’s not an asshole about it,” one offered. “He knows when to let people make idiots of themselves,” was another nugget of wisdom. “He’s tall and he can wear the hell out of a puffer jacket. Verrry difficult to pull off as a man,” was the scientific thesis from one friend who went down a bit of a rabbit hole of past videos purely for research purposes.

So yes, Klepper, like many normal-looking white men have benefited from the relaxed standards of quarantine and the time spent growing facial hair during the lockdown, but Hasan Minhaj already warned us about this phenomenon. It couldn’t just be Klepper’s looks that had more and more fans on Twitter wanting him to break them off like a damn Kit-Kat bar.

So I pressed on, watching Klepper eventually don masks when the pandemic surged and embed himself further in the chaos of the right-wing horde. He went to Million MAGA marches where he endured the insult of being called “broseph” by a Tea Party member wearing a mohawk helmet. He courageously waded through Coronavirus-riddled crowds to talk SCOTUS picks and mask mandates with tacky-shirt-wearing pretzel-munchers. I overlooked the caveman ramblings unexpectedly unearthed by Klepper’s brand of machismo, ignoring crude would-be thirst tweets like “Fold me like a beef taco you sardonic skyscraper,” and “He might be built like a Sequoia but he could split me in half like a lumberjack” that randomly popped into my brain during these viewings. Instead, I tried to figure out why Klepper and his brand of comedy might hold some appeal this year, an appeal that goes beyond Youtube hits and next-day shares and the disturbing collective need we all have for him to choke us with his favorite skinny tie.

Here’s what I got.

In a time when competence is an undervalued quality, when intelligence is something to be sneered at, when open-mindedness is cordoned to safe-spaces and unchecked hate floods the streets instead, Klepper chooses to disrupt the norm by interrogating it and dismantling it, by holding it up to the comedic light and asking people to defend it. He’s good at toeing the line between sarcastic apathy and mild amusement – able to suppress personal outrage in order to let his subjects do the easy work of embarrassing themselves for him. He’s charismatic – enough that even Trump supporters who probably know his gotcha-antics still want to talk to him – and that charisma is what disarms people whose ideologies he’s calling into question. If 2020 has proven anything it’s that what Klepper does isn’t easy – but it’s necessary and entertaining and maybe it’s making a difference.

Okay fine. That and he’s most definitely become one of the few white men we’d save from the purge. Godspeed you lighthouse-shaped beacon of humanity!

After winning the 2020 NBA title, the Los Angeles Lakers didn’t simply “run it back” with the same cast of characters. To be fair, the Lakers are still built around LeBron James and Anthony Davis, with a number of key cogs returning, but Los Angeles did overhaul its frontcourt, investing in Montrezl Harrell and Marc Gasol to replace Dwight Howard and JaVale McGee at the center spot. In discussing the team’s additions on an upcoming podcast episode, James got into some detail on Wes Matthews (who will bolster the Lakers’ wing rotation), Harrell and Gasol, but he did make sure to nudge Gasol when it comes to a prominent award James didn’t win.

James led with the fact that he is “happy as hell” to have Gasol on board, and he will bring an interesting profile as an impactful defensive piece with high-end basketball IQ. However, he pivoted to a joke about Gasol having “his” Defensive Player of the Year trophy, referencing the fact that Gasol won the award in 2012-13, with James finishing second.

It has to be noted that James won the 2012-13 MVP award, garnering all but one first-place vote, so it wasn’t as if it was a bad year for the 16-time All-Star. Still, the 2012-13 season was the closest James ever came to winning DPOY and, while it probably doesn’t bother him too much, there could be a grain of truth when it is brought up (unprompted) in this fashion.

Gasol isn’t the kind of rim-running force that Howard and McGee were last season, but Harrell can handle the offensive production, while Gasol can potentially pair with James and Davis for a treacherous defensive trio. Regardless, James seems upbeat about his new teammates, even if he just had to get a shot in about one of the only pieces of hardware he doesn’t actually have with his name on it.

Sometimes it seems like social media is too full of trolls and misinformation to justify its continued existence, but then something comes along that makes it all worth it.

Apparently, a song many of us have never heard of shot to the top of the charts in Italy in 1972 for the most intriguing reason. The song, written and performed by Adriano Celentano and is called “Prisencolinensinainciusol” which means…well, nothing. It’s gibberish. In fact, the entire song is nonsense lyrics made to sound like English, and oddly, it does.

Occasionally, you can hear what sounds like a real word or phrase here and there—”eyes” and “color balls died” and “alright” a few times, for example—but it mostly just sounds like English without actually being English. It’s like an auditory illusion and it does some super trippy things to your brain to listen to it.

Plus the video someone shared to go with it is fantastic. It’s gone crazy viral because how could it not.

And if you thought that video was something, check out another one of the same song by the same singer. Why are there two videos? Who knows. But this is truly one of the most 1970s things that has ever happened.

Adriano Celentano – Prisencolinensinainciusol

www.youtube.com

Wow, right?

In a 2012 interview on NPR’s All Things Considered, Celentano explained how the silly pop song came about.

“Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did,” he told Guy Raz, through interpreter Sim Smiley.

“So at a certain point, because I like American slang—which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian—I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate,” he said. “And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn’t mean anything.”

In fact, Celentano didn’t even write down any lyrics for the song at first, but just improvised the sounds. And people didn’t appear to care. “Prisencolinensinainciusol” reached number one on the charts not only in Italy, but also in France, Germany, and Belgium.

Celentano’s ability to sound like he’s singing in English without actually saying anything in English is pretty impressive. Especially when you hear him sing in Italian, like this:

Adriano Celentano – L’emozione non ha voce – Official Video (With Lyrics/Parole in descrizione)

www.youtube.com

Languages are fun. And funky. And frustrating when you don’t understand them. Celentano was purposefully making a point with “Prisencolinensinainciusol” to break down language barriers and inspire people to communicate more. Whether he succeeded in doing that or not, it sure is entertaining to see him try.

Travis Scott is proving himself a savvy entrepreneur, on top of being an award-winning musician. His collaboration with McDonald’s was so successful that his Happy Meal toy is being re-sold online for $50,000. Now, other companies, like PlayStation, are setting their sights on a partnership with the rapper — and there could be some exciting projects in the works.

Back in October, the game giant announced they had inked a deal with Scott for him to not only contribute to the creative side of their brand but to also spearhead “innovative projects” in partnership with them and his Cactus Jack brand. Per a recent report from XXL, one “innovative project” could include a PlayStation game designed by the rapper, as well as a co-branded console.

While a video game and console could be on the table, some projects that Scott worked on with PlayStation have already seen the light of day. He recently voiced a commercial and also dropped a line of merch with PlayStation.

News of the exciting potential projects arrives following a report from Forbes that Scott’s McDonald’s partnership earned him a head-turning amount of cash. According to the publication, his original endorsement contract was for $5 million but he ended up earning over $15 million from his McDonald’s merch — totaling an impressive $20 million for the entire deal.

You know who doesn’t get enough starring roles? Peter Dinklage. He’s always been one of the best things about any project he’s involved with, from Game of Thrones to The Station Agent to his blistering screen debut, the indie Living in Oblivion, in which he ruthlessly attacked lazy filmmakers who think dwarfism is in itself surreal. And while he gets his share of co-lead efforts, he rarely has the main role to himself.

That, finally, is about to change: As per Deadline, Dinklage has been cast in the lead in a long-in-the-works remake of The Toxic Avenger, the beloved horror-camp-comedy about a dweeb who becomes a roided-up mutant superhero after tumbling into toxic waste. The 1984 original — a staple of USA’s classic trash movie show Up All Night — yielded three sequels, plus a short-lived TV show, a musical, and a Sega Genesis video game.

All of the Toxic Avenger films were made by the proudly low-budget camp horror maestros at Troma Entertainment, and though the company’s legendary co-founder Lloyd Kaufman is involved with the reboot, it’s not clear how close they’ll stick to the original run’s tone. The film’s director is Macon Blair, who appeared in Jeremy Saulnier’s wincingly dark thrillers Blue Ruin and Green Room before embarking on his directorial debut, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, starring Melanie Lynskey and Elijah Wood. That film mixed mordant, everyday humor with gasp-inducing shocks, so it should be interesting to see what blend he brings to good ol’ Toxie.

(Via Deadline)

With the 2020-21 NBA season rapidly approaching, there are myriad topics to discuss. For the teams that have not released their “City Edition” jerseys, uniform chatter is also picking up ahead of the downbeat of the campaign and, over the weekend, a new look emerged for the Cleveland Cavaliers. In typical fashion, opinions varied wildly when it comes to the aesthetics of the jerseys, but an intrepid observer did the work to figure out that Cleveland’s ambitious lettering wasn’t just a coincidence.

As you can see, the lettering is seemingly taken from a combination of the Sex Pistols, David Bowie, Metallica, Led Zeppelin, Nirvana and Pink Floyd. This might seem a bit odd for an NBA team but, considering the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is housed in Cleveland, the picture starts to come together.

It should be noted that, at the time of this post, the Cavs have actually announced these jerseys yet. As such, they haven’t issued the full explainer that often comes with this kind of release, but this makes too much sense to not be the actual explanation, which will lead to real questions if it doesn’t end being touted as the backstory.

The Cavs will be an interesting team in 2020-21, especially after a quiet offseason when compared to many Eastern Conference foes. If nothing else, they will have an intriguing new jersey option, and it seems to mirror a prominent local interest, reflecting the point of the “City Edition” the whole time.

You don’t need us to tell you that 2020 has been a weird one. Society has come as close to an actual dystopia than at any point since the 1970s, if not earlier than that, and we’re still far from out of the woodwork. It seems even Black Mirror — the nightmarish show that’s long argued that technology unlocks humanity’s basest instincts, when we now know all it takes is a demagogue preying upon racial and tribalist instincts — didn’t predict the cluster of clusterf*cks that descended upon the world in the last year. But the show’s creator, Charlie Brooker, may be making amends for that with a forthcoming Netflix mockumentary about our epically crap year.

This comes from a new interview with Hugh Grant, who was speaking to Vulture (in a bit sussed out by Deadline) about his just-wrapped HBO drama The Undoing. When asked about future projects, he blurted out that he was “doing a thing tomorrow, actually,” then mentioned that said thing was the aforementioned mockumentary. He offered few details, and in fact it doesn’t seem the project had been made public before Grant mentioned it. But at least we know who he’ll play. “I am a historian who’s being interviewed about the year,” he said. “I’m pretty repellent, actually! And you’ll like my wig.”

Mind you, we don’t know if Grant’s the star or one of many stars, or what approach it will take or, really, anything beyond the three or four details the beloved actor let loose upon the world. And since Grant is still doing some filming for the show, you may have to wait to learn more.

In the meantime, you can always look back at a rosier time by watching old episodes of Black Mirror, when our main worries were things like Twitter and Facebook-like social media apps and an optical device that allows you to literally block anyone you don’t like. Ah, life of, like, one year ago…

(Via Vulture and Deadline)

Miami-born Dominican-American singer DaniLeigh started out as Prince’s protege, even earning the chance to direct his video for “Breakfast Can Wait” at just 18 years old. But she’s now making moves of her own. On the heels of her sophomore album, Movie, which boasted appearances from big names like DaBaby, PartyNextDoor, Gunna, and Fivio Foreign, DaniLeigh shares a video alongside her track “Monique.”

Things kick off with DaniLeigh riding around in a powder blue Jeep, delivering her verses while taking laps and climbing on top of the vehicle. The video then cuts to a scene of the musician in a contract negotiation meeting, complete with a table scattered with cash and jewelry. Knowing her worth, the singer refuses to sign and kicks the businessman to the curb. “Ice out the Rollie, roll down the streets / Flooded ’cause life is a beach / You cannot hear me ’cause I’m out of reach / All type of designer is packed in my brief,” she raps.

Before the release of her latest video, the singer also stopped by Uproxx Studios to perform a rendition of the track. You can check that out here. And you can watch DaniLeigh’s “Monique” video above.

Movie is out now via Def Jam. Get it here.

President-elect Joe Biden has sweeping plans for expanding LGBTQ rights when he takes office in January 2021. Among them, a plan to reverse Donald Trump’s near ban on allowing transgender people to serve in the military.

In 2016, President Obama allowed transgender individuals to serve openly in the U.S. military and have access to gender-affirming psychological and medical care.

However, the Trump administration reversed course in 2017, when Trump dropped a surprise tweet saying the military “cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”

The Trump administration used the cost of gender-confirming medical care as an excuse to discriminate against transgender Americans, but the numbers don’t add up.

“Well, it is what it is,” Trump told Piers Morgan. “Also massive amounts of people going in and then asking for the operation, and the operation is $200,000, $250,000.”

Dr. Joshua Safer, the executive director at Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, disputed Trump’s claims in an interview with Time. He says that the real cost is closer to $25,000 on the low-end to as much as $100,000.

A 2016 report by Rand found that providing gender-affirming care to transgender troops would cost between $2.4 million and $8.4 million annually. In comparison, the Defense Department spends $80 million a year on medication for erectile dysfunction.

The Trump administration’s policy change went into effect in 2019 and although it wasn’t a complete ban on all transgender military personnel, it drastically limited the enlistment of transgender individuals.

Under the new policy, currently serving transgender individuals who have already received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria can continue to serve under the gender which they identify and receive gender-conforming treatments.

However, after the new policy took effect, anyone with a gender dysphoria diagnosis who is taking hormones or has undergone a gender transition was not allowed to enlist.

via Ted Eytan / Flickr

“The policy is insidious in operation but designed to be as comprehensive a ban as possible,” a report from the nonpartisan Palm Center, which studies LGBTQ military issues, stated.

“In that sense, it is a perfect parallel to the failed ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, also sold as not being a ban although designed to systemically push gay people out of military service — or at least keep them silent and invisible,” the report continued.

Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, says that reversing the Trump policy should be as easy as “pushing a button” and she expects it’ll be “one of the first things he does.”

Biden has said he will direct the Pentagon to allow transgender troops to serve and get medical care because it’s what’s best for all Americans. The Trump policy is “discriminatory and detrimental to our national security,” Biden’s campaign website says.

In addition to reversing Trump’s transgender ban, Biden has pledged to support efforts to ban LGBT conversion therapy and reinstate Obama administration guidance directing public schools to allow transgender students to access bathrooms.

Biden’s top legislative priority for LGBTQ issues is to pass the Equality Act which would extend anti-bias protections to LGBT individuals as they apply to housing, public accommodations, and public services.

As Vice President, Joe Biden was lauded by the LGBT community for coming out in favor of gay marriage even before President Obama. It appears as though, as president, he’s going to give the LGBT even more reasons to celebrate.